CHAPTER IV.

LYNDALL.

SHE was more like a princess, yes, far more like a princess,
than the lady who still hung on the wall in Tant' Sannie's bed-room. So Em
thought. She leaned back in the little armchair; she wore a grey dressing-gown,
and her long hair was combed out and hung to the ground. Em, sitting before her,
looked up with mingled respect and admiration.

Lyndall was tired after her long journey, and had come to her room early. Her
eyes ran over the familiar objects. Strange to go away for four years, and come
back, and find that the candle standing on the dressing-table still cast the
page: 26 shadow of an old crone's head in the corner
beyond the clothes-horse. Strange that even a shadow should last longer than a
man! She looked about among the old familiar objects; all was there, but the old
self was gone.

“What are you noticing?” asked Em.

“Nothing and everything. I thought the windows were higher. If I were you, when I
get this place I should raise the walls. There is not room to breathe here; one
suffocates.”

“Gregory is going to make many alterations,” said Em; and drawing nearer to the
grey dressing-gown respectfully. “Do you like him, Lyndall? Is he not
handsome?”

“He must have been a fine baby,” said Lyndall, looking at the white dimity
curtain that hung above the window.

Em was puzzled.

“There are some men,” said Lyndall, “whom you never can believe were babies at
all; and
page: 27 others you never see without thinking
how very nice they must have looked when they wore socks and pink sashes.”

Em remained silent; then she said with a little dignity,

“When you know him you will love him as I do. When I compare other people with
him, they seem so weak and little. Our hearts are so cold, our
loves are mixed up with so many other things. But he—no one is worthy of his
love. I am not. It is so great and pure.”

“You need not make yourself unhappy upon that point—your poor return for his
love, my dear,” said Lyndall. “A man's love is a fire of olive-wood. It leaps
higher every moment; it roars, it blazes, it shoots out red flames; it threatens
to wrap you round and devour you—you who stand by like an icicle in the glow of
its fierce warmth. You are self-reproached at your own chilliness and want of
reciprocity.
page: 28 The next day, when you go to
warm your hands a little, you find a few ashes! 'Tis a long love and cool
against a short love and hot; men, at all events, have nothing to complain
of.”

“You speak so because you do not know men,” said Em, instantly assuming the
dignity of superior knowledge so universally affected by affianced and married
women in discussing man's nature with their uncontracted sisters.

“You will know them too some day, and then you will think differently,” said Em,
with the condescending magnanimity which superior knowledge can always afford to
show to ignorance.

Lyndall's little lip quivered in a manner indicative of intense amusement. She
twirled a massive ring upon her forefinger—a ring more suitable for the hand of
a man, and noticeable in design—a diamond cross let into gold, with the initials
“R.R.” below it.

page: 29

“Ah, Lyndall,” Em cried, “perhaps you are engaged yourself—that is why you smile.
Yes; I am sure you are. Look at this ring!”

Lyndall drew the hand quickly from her.

“I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot; and I do not
so greatly admire the crying of babies,” she said, as she closed her eyes half
wearily and leaned back in the chair. “There are other women glad of such
work.”

Em felt rebuked and ashamed. How could she take Lyndall and show her the white
linen and the wreath, and the embroidery? She was quiet for a little while, and
then began to talk about Trana, and the old farm-servants, till she saw her
companion was weary; then she rose and left her for the night. But after Em was
gone Lyndall sat on, watching the old crone's face in the corner, and with a
weary look, as
page: 30 though the whole world's weight
rested on these frail young shoulders.

The next morning, Waldo, starting off before breakfast with a bag of mealies
slung over his shoulder to feed the ostriches, heard a light step behind
him.

“Wait for me; I am coming with you,” said Lyndall, adding as she came up to him,
“If I had not gone to look for you yesterday you would not have come to greet me
till now. Do you not like me any longer, Waldo?”

“Yes—but—you are changed.”

It was the old clumsy, hesitating mode of speech.

“You like the pinafores better?” she said quickly. She wore a dress of a simple
cotton fabric, but very fashionably made, and on her head was a broad white hat.
To Waldo she seemed superbly attired. She saw it. “My dress has changed a
little,” she said, “and I also;
page: 31 but not to you.
Hang the bag over your other shoulder, that I may see your face. You say so
little that if one does not look at you you are an uncomprehended cipher.” Waldo
changed the bag, and they walked on side by side. “You have improved,” she said.
“Do you know that I have sometimes wished to see you while I was away; not
often, but still sometimes.”

They were at the gate of the first camp now. Waldo threw over a mug of mealies,
and they walked on over the dewy ground.

“Have you learnt much?” he asked her simply, remembering how she had once said,
“When I come back again I shall know everything that a human being can.”

She laughed.

“Are you thinking of my old boast? Yes; I have learnt something, though hardly
what I expected, and not quite so much. In the first place, I have
learnt that one of my ancestors
page: 32 must have been
a very great fool; for they say nothing comes out in a man but one of his
forefathers possessed it before him. In the second place, I have discovered that
of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up
a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the worst. They are
called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They
finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate. They are
nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, ‘Into how little
space a human soul can be crushed?’ I have seen some souls so compressed that
they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move there, wide
room. A woman who has been for many years in one of those places carries the
mark of the beast on her till she dies, though she may expand a little
afterward, when she breathes in the free world.”

page: 33

“Were you miserable?” he asked, looking at her with quick anxiety.

“I?—no. I am never miserable and never happy. I wish I were. But I should have
run away from the place on the fourth day, and hired myself to the first
Boer-woman whose farm I came to, to make fire under her soap-pot, if I had to
live as the rest of the drove did. Can you form an idea, Waldo, of what it must
be to be shut up with cackling old women, who are without knowledge of life,
without love of the beautiful, without strength, to have your soul cultured by
them? It is suffocation only to breathe the air they breathe; but I made them
give me room. I told them I should leave, and they knew I came there on my own
account; so they gave me a bed-room without the companionship of one of those
things that were having their brains slowly diluted and squeezed out of them. I
did not learn music, because I had no
page: 34 talent;
and when the drove made cushions, and hideous flowers that the roses laugh at,
and a footstool in six weeks that a machine would have made better in five
minutes, I went to my room. With the money saved from such work I bought books
and newspapers, and at night I sat up. I read, and epitomized what I read; and I
found time to write some plays, and find out how hard it is to make your
thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink and
paper. In the holidays I learnt a great deal more. I made acquaintances, saw a
few places and many people, and some different ways of living, which is more
than any books can show one. On the whole, I am not dissatisfied with my four
years. I have not learnt what I expected; but I have learnt something else. What
have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

page: 35

“That is not possible. I shall find out by and by.”

They still stepped on side by side over the dewy bushes. Then suddenly she turned
on him.

“Don't you wish you were a woman, Waldo?”

“No,” he answered readily.

She laughed.

“I thought not. Even you are too worldly wise for that. I never met a man who
did. This is a pretty ring,” she said, holding out her little hand, that the
morning sun might make the diamonds sparkle. “Worth fifty pounds at least. I
will give it to the first man who tells me he would like to be a woman. There
might be one on Robbin Island* who
would win it perhaps, but I doubt it even there. It is delightful to be a woman;
but every man thanks the Lord devoutly that he isn't one.”

Lunatics at the
Cape are sent to Robbin Island.

page: 36

She drew her hat to one side to keep the sun out of her eyes as she walked. Waldo
looked at her so intently that he stumbled over the bushes. Yes, this was his
little Lyndall who had worn the check pinafores; he saw it now, and he walked
closer beside her. They reached the next camp.

“Let us wait at this camp and watch the birds,” she said, as an ostrich hen came
bounding toward them with velvety wings outstretched, while far away over the
bushes the head of the cock was visible as he sat brooding on the eggs.

Lyndall folded her arms on the gate-bar, and Waldo threw his empty bag on the
wall and leaned beside her.

“I like these birds,” she said; “they share each other's work, and are
companions. Do you take an interest in the position of women, Waldo?”

“No.”

page: 37

“I thought not. No one does, unless they are in need of a subject upon which to
show their wit. And as for you, from of old you can see nothing that is not
separated from you by a few millions of miles, and strewed over with mystery. If
women were the inhabitants of Jupiter, of whom you had happened to hear
something, you would pore over us and our condition night and day; but because
we are before your eyes you never look at us. You care nothing that
this is ragged and ugly,” she said, putting her little finger
on his sleeve; “but you strive mightily to make an imaginary leaf on an old
stick beautiful. I'm sorry you don't care for the position of women; I should
have liked us to be friends; and it is the only thing about which I think much
or feel much—if, indeed, I have any feeling about anything,” she added,
flippantly, readjusting her dainty little arms. “When I was a baby, I fancy my
parents left me out in the
page: 38 frost one night, and
I got nipped internally—it feels so!”

“Show me what you feel,” he said. “I have only a few old thoughts, and I think
them over and over again; always beginning where I left off. I never get any
further. I am weary of them. I am like an old hen that sits on eggs month after
month and they never come out.”

“And I,” she said quickly, “am so pressed in upon by new things that, lest they
should trip one another up, I have to keep forcing them back. My head swings
sometimes. But this one thought stands, never goes—if I might but be one of
these born in the future; then perhaps to be born a woman will not be to be born
branded.”

Waldo looked at her. It was hard to say whether she were in earnest or
mocking.

“I know it is foolish. Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down,”
she said.

page: 39

“But we are cursed. Waldo, born cursed from the time our mothers bring us into
the world till the shrouds are put on us. Do not look at me as though I were
talking nonsense. Everything has two sides—the outside that is ridiculous, and
the inside that is solemn.”

“I am not laughing,” said the boy solemnly enough; “but what curses you?”

He thought she would not reply to him, she waited so long.

“It is not what is done to us, but what is made of us,” she said at last, “that
wrongs us. No man can be really injured but by what modifies himself. We all
enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force perhaps, but
for the rest—blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by
the ends it sets before us. To you it says—“Work;” and to us it
says—“Seem!” To you it says—As you approximate to man's highest
ideal of God, as your arm
page: 40 is strong and your
knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall gain all that
human heart desires. To us it says—Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge,
nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world
makes men and women.

“Look at this little chin of mine, Waldo, with the dimple in it. It is but a
small part of my person; but though I had a knowledge of all things under the
sun, and the wisdom to use it, and the deep loving heart of an angel, it would
not stead me through life like this little chin. I can win money with it, I can
win love; I can win power with it, I can win fame. What would knowledge help me?
The less a woman has in her head the lighter she is for climbing. I once heard
an old man say, that he never saw intellect help a woman so much as a pretty
ankle; and it was the truth. They begin to
page: 41
shape us to our cursed end,” she said, with her lips drawn in to look as though
they smiled, “when we are tiny things in shoes and socks. We sit with our little
feet drawn up under us in the window, and look out at the boys in their happy
play. We want to go. Then a loving hand is laid on us: ‘Little one, you cannot
go,’ they say; ‘your little face will burn, and your nice white dress be
spoiled.’ We feel it must be for our good, it is so lovingly said: but we cannot
understand; and we kneel still with one little cheek wistfully pressed against
the pane. Afterwards we go and thread blue beads, and make a string for our
neck; and we go and stand before the glass. We see the complexion we were not to
spoil, and the white frock, and we look into our own great eyes. Then the curse
begins to act on us. It finishes its work when we are grown women, who no more
look out wistfully at a more healthy life; we are
page: 42 contented. We fit our sphere as a Chinese-woman's foot fits her shoe exactly,
as though God had made both—and yet He knows nothing of either. In some of us
the shaping of our end has been quite completed. The parts we are not to use
have been quite atrophied, and have even dropped off; but in others, and we are
not less to be pitied, they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages,
but our limbs have not grown to them; we know that we are compressed, and chafe
against them.

“But what does it help? A little bitterness, a little longing when we are young,
a little futile searching for work, a little passionate striving for room for
the exercise of our powers,—and then we go with the drove. A woman must march
with her regiment. In the end she must be trodden down or go with it; and if she
is wise she goes.

“I see in your great eyes what you are
page: 43
thinking,” she said, glancing at him; “I always know what the person I am
talking to is thinking of. How is this woman who makes such a fuss worse off
than I? I will show you by a very little example. We stand here at this gate
this morning, both poor, both young, both friendless; there is not much to
choose between us. Let us turn away just as we are, to make our way in life.
This evening you will come to a farmer's house. The farmer, albeit you come
alone on foot, will give you a pipe of tobacco and a cup of coffee and a bed. If
he has no dam to build and no child to teach, to-morrow you can go on your way
with a friendly greeting of the hand. I, if I come to the same place to-night,
will have strange questions asked me, strange glances cast on me. The Boer-wife
will shake her head and give me food to eat with the Kaffirs, and a right to
sleep with the dogs. That would be the first step in our
page: 44 progress—a very little one, but every step to the end
would repeat it. We were equals once when we lay new-born babes on our nurses'
knees. We will be equals again when they tie up our jaws for the last
sleep.”

Waldo looked in wonder at the little quivering face; it was a glimpse into a
world of passion and feeling wholly new to him.

“Mark you,” she said, “we have always this advantage over you—we can at any time
step into ease and competence, where you must labour patiently for it. A little
weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of
our advantages, and then some man will say—‘Come, be my wife!’ With good looks
and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has
sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no
creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way.
page: 45 Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol
of the union of souls; marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that
defiles the world.” She ran her little finger savagely along the topmost bar,
shaking off the dozen little dewdrops that still hung there. “And they tell us
we have men's chivalrous attention!” she cried. “When we ask to be doctors,
lawyers, law-makers, anything but ill-paid drudges, they say,—No; but you have
men's chivalrous attention; now think of that and be satisfied! What would you
do without it?”

The bitter little silvery laugh, so seldom heard, rang out across the bushes. She
bit her little teeth together.

“I was coming up in Cobb and Co.'s the other day. At a little wayside hotel we
had to change the large coach for a small one. We were ten passengers, eight men
and two women. As I sat in the house the gentlemen came and
page: 46 whispered to me, ‘There is not room for all in the
new coach, take your seat quickly.’ We hurried out, and they gave me the best
seat, and covered me with rugs, because it was drizzling. Then the last
passenger came running up to the coach—an old woman with a wonderful bonnet, and
a black shawl pinned with a yellow pin.

“‘There is no room,’ they said; ‘you must wait till next week's coach takes you
up;’ but she climbed on to the step, and held on at the window with both
hands.

“‘My son-in-law is ill, and I must go and see him,’ she said.

“‘My good woman,’ said one, ‘I am really exceedingly sorry that your son-in-law
is ill; but there is absolutely no room for you here.’

“‘You had better get down,’ said another, ‘or the wheel will catch you.’

“I got up to give her my place.

“‘Oh, no, no!’ they cried, ‘we will not allow that.’

page: 47

“‘I will rather kneel,’ said one, and he crouched down at my feet; so the woman
came in.

“There were nine of us in that coach, and only one showed chivalrous
attention—and that was a woman to a woman.

“I shall be old and ugly, too, one day, and I shall look for men's chivalrous
help, but I shall not find it.

“The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done, and then
they fly over them. I don't know if the flowers feel grateful to the bees; they
are great fools if they do.”

“But some women,” said Waldo, speaking as though the words forced themselves from
him at that moment, “some women have power.”

She lifted her beautiful eyes to his face.

“Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have
power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up
page: 48 the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run
free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there;
it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then
covertly for evil; but it will act. If Goethe had been stolen away a child, and
reared in a robber horde in the depths of a German forest, do you think the
world would have had ‘Faust’ and ‘Iphegenie?’ But he would have been Goethe
still—stronger, wiser than his fellows. At night, round their watch-fire, he
would have chanted wild songs of rapine and murder, till the dark faces about
him were moved and trembled. His songs would have echoed on from father to son,
and nerved the heart and arm—for evil. Do you think if Napoleon had been born a
woman that he would have been contented to give small tea-parties and talk small
scandal? He would have risen; but the world would not have heard of him as
page: 49 it hears of him now—a man great and kingly,
with all his sins; he would have left one of those names that stain the leaf of
every history—the names of women, who, having power, but being denied the right
to exercise it openly, rule in the dark, covertly, and by stealth, through the
men whose passions they feed on and by whom they climb.

“Power!” she said, suddenly, smiting her little hand upon the rail. “Yes, we have
power; and since we are not to expend it in tunnelling mountains, nor healing
diseases, nor making laws, nor money, nor on any extraneous object, we expend it
on you. You are our goods, our merchandise, our material for
operating on; we buy you, we sell you, we make fools of you, we act the wily old
Jew with you, we keep six of you crawling to our little feet, and praying only
for a touch of our little hand; and they say truly, there was never an ache or
pain or
page: 50 broken heart but a woman was at the
bottom of it. We are not to study law, nor science, nor art, so we study you.
There is never a nerve or fibre in a man's nature but we know it. We keep six of
you dancing in the palm of one little hand,” she said, balancing her
outstretched arm gracefully, as though tiny beings disported themselves in its
palm. “There—we throw you away, and you sink to the devil,” she said, folding
her arms composedly. “There was never a man who said one word for woman but he
said two for man, and three for the whole human race.”

She watched the bird pecking up the last yellow grains; but Waldo looked only at
her.

When she spoke again it was very measuredly.

“They bring weighty arguments against us when we ask for the perfect freedom of
women,” she said; “but, when you come up to the objections, they are like
pumpkin-devils, with
page: 51 candles inside, hollow,
and can't bite. They say that women do not wish for the sphere and freedom we
ask for them, and would not use it!

“If the bird does like its cage, and does like its
sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut? Why not
open it, only a little? Do they know, there is many a bird will not break its
wings against the bars, but would fly if the doors were open.

“Then they say again, ‘If women have the liberty you ask for, they will be found
in positions for which they have not talent!’ If two men climb one ladder, did
you ever see the weakest anywhere but at the foot? The surest sign of fitness is
success. The weakest never wins but where there is handicapping. Nature, left to
herself, will as beautifully apportion a man's work to his capacities as long
ages ago she graduated the colours on the bird's breast. If we are not fit you
give us to no purpose the
page: 52 right to labour; the
work will fall out of our hands into those that are abler.”

She talked more quickly and eagerly as she went on, as one talks of that over
which they have brooded long, and which lies near their hearts.

Waldo watched her intently.

“They say women have one great and noble work left them, and they do it ill.—That
is true; they do it execrably. It is the work that demands the broadest culture,
and they have not even the narrowest. The lawyer may see no deeper than his law
books, and the chemist see no further than the windows of his laboratory, and
they may do their work well. But the woman who does woman's work needs a
many-sided, multiform culture; the heights and depths of human life must strike
an answering chord in her; she must have knowledge of men and things in many
states, a wide catholicity
page: 53 of sympathy, the
strength that springs from knowledge, and the magnanimity which springs from
strength. We bear the world, and we make it. The souls
of little children are marvellously delicate and tender things, and keep for
ever the shadow that first falls on them, and that is the mother's or at best a
woman's. There was never a great man who had not a great mother—it is hardly an
exaggeration. The first six years of our life make us; all that is added later
is veneer; and yet some say, if a woman can cook a dinner or dress herself she
has culture enough.

“The mightiest and noblest of human work is given to us, and we do it ill. Send
an untutored navvie to work into an artist's studio, and see what you will find
there! And yet, thank God, we have this work,” she added quickly: “it is the one
window through which we see into the great world of earnest labour. The meanest
girl who
page: 54 dances and dresses becomes something
higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the
only education we have and which they cannot take from us.”

“And they say,” she went on, “that we complain of woman's being compelled to look
upon marriage as a profession; but that she is free to enter upon it or leave
it, as she pleases.

“Yes—and a cat set afloat in a pond is free to sit in the tub till it dies, it is
under no obligation to wet its feet; and a drowning man may catch at a straw or
not, just as he likes—it is a glorious liberty! Let any man think for five
minutes of what old maidenhood means to a woman—and then let him be silent. Is
it easy to bear through life a name that in itself signifies defeat? to dwell,
as nine out of ten unmarried women must, under the finger of another woman? Is
it easy to look forward to an old age without honour, without the reward
page: 55 of useful labour, without love? I wonder how
many men there are who would give up everything that is dear in life for the
sake of maintaining a high purity.”

She laughed, a little laugh that was clear without being pleasant. “And then,
when they have no other argument against us, they say—‘Go on; but when you have
made women what you wish, and her children inherit her culture, you will defeat
yourself. Man will gradually become extinct from excess of intellect, the
passions which replenish the race will die.’ Fools!” she said, curling her
pretty lip; “a Hottentot sits at the road-side, and feeds on a rotten bone he
has found there, and takes out his bottle of Cape-smoke and swills at it, and
grunts with satisfaction; and the cultured child of the nineteenth century sits
in his arm-chair, and sips choice wines with the lip of a connoisseur, and
tastes delicate dishes with a
page: 56 delicate palate,
and with a satisfaction of which the Hottentot knows nothing. Heavy jaw and
sloping forehead—all have gone with increasing intellect; but the animal
appetites are there still—refined, discriminative, but immeasurably intensified.
Fools! Before men forgave or worshipped, while they were weak on their hind
legs, did they not eat and drink and fight for wives? When all the latter
additions to humanity have vanished, will not the foundation on which they are
built remain?”

She was silent then for a while, and said somewhat dreamily, more as though
speaking to herself than to him,—

“They ask, What will you gain, even if man does not become extinct?—you will have
brought justice and equality on to the earth, and sent love from it. When men
and women are equals they will love no more. Your highly-cultured women will not
be lovable, will not love.

page: 57

“Do they see nothing, understand nothing? It is Tant' Sannie who buries husbands
one after another, and folds her hands resignedly,—‘The Lord gave, and the Lord
hath taken away, and blessed be the name of the Lord,’— and she looks for
another. It is the hard-headed, deep thinker who, when the wife who has thought
and worked with him goes, can find no rest, and lingers near her till he finds
sleep beside her.

“A great soul draws and is drawn with a more fierce intensity than any small one.
By every inch we grow in intellectual height our love strikes down its roots
deeper, and spreads out its arms wider. It is for love's sake yet more than for
any other that we look for that new time.” She had leaned her head against the
stones, and watched with her sad, soft eyes the retreating bird. “Then when that
time comes,” she said lowly, “when love is no more bought or sold, when it is
not a means of making bread,
page: 58 when each woman's
life is filled with earnest, independent labour, then love will come to her, a
strange, sudden sweetness breaking in upon her earnest work; not sought for, but
found. Then, but not now—”

Waldo waited for her to finish the sentence, but she seemed to have forgotten
him.

“Lyndall,” he said, putting his hand upon her—she started—“if you think that that
new time will be so great, so good, you who speak so easily—”

She interrupted him.

“Speak! speak!” she said, “the difficulty is not to speak; the difficulty is to
keep silence.”

“But why do you not try to bring that time?” he said with pitiful simplicity.
“When you speak I believe all you say; other people would listen to you
also.”

“I am not so sure of that,” she said with a smile.

page: 59

Then over the small face came the weary look it had worn last night as it watched
the shadow in the corner, Ah, so weary!

“I, Waldo, I?” she said. “I will do nothing good for myself, nothing for the
world, till some one wakes me. I am asleep, swathed, shut up in self; till I
have been delivered I will deliver no one.”

He looked at her wondering, but she was not looking at him.

“To see the good and the beautiful,” she said, “and to have no strength to live
it, is only to be Moses on the mountain of Nebo, with the land at your feet and
no power to enter. It would be better not to see it. Come,” she said, looking up
into his face, and seeing its uncomprehending expression, “let us go, it is
getting late. Doss is anxious for his breakfast also,” she added, wheeling round
and calling to the dog, who was endeavouring to unearth a mole, an
page: 60 occupation to which he had been zealously addicted
from the third month, but in which he had never on any single occasion proved
successful.

Waldo shouldered his bag, and Lyndall walked on before in silence, with the dog
close to her side. Perhaps she thought of the narrowness of the limits within
which a human soul may speak and be understood by its nearest of mental kin, of
how soon it reaches that solitary land of the individual experience, in which no
fellow footfall is ever heard. Whatever her thoughts may have been, she was soon
interrupted. Waldo came close to her, and standing still, produced with
awkwardness from his breast-pocket a small carved box.

“I made it for you,” he said, holding it out.

“I like it,” she said, examining it carefully.

The workmanship was better than that of the grave-post. The flowers that covered
it were delicate, and here and there small conical
pro-
protuberances
page: 61 tuberances were let in among them.
She turned it round critically. Waldo bent over it lovingly.

“There is one strange thing about it,” he said earnestly, putting a finger on one
little pyramid. “I made it without these, and I felt something was wrong; I
tried many changes, and at last I let these in, and then it was right. But why
was it? They are not beautiful in themselves.”

“They relieve the monotony of the smooth leaves, I suppose.”

He shook his head as over a weighty matter.

“The sky is monotonous,” he said, “when it is blue, and yet it is beautiful. I
have thought of that often; but it is not monotony and it is not variety makes
beauty. What is it? The sky, and your face, and this box—the same thing is in
them all, only more in the sky and in your face. But what is it?”

She smiled.

“So you are at your old work still. Why,
page: 62 why,
why? What is the reason? It is enough for me,” she said, “if I find out what is
beautiful and what is ugly, what is real and what is not. Why it is there, and
over the final cause of things in general, I don't trouble myself; there must be
one, but what is it to me? If I howl to all eternity I shall never get hold of
it; and if I did I might be no better off. But you Germans are born with an
aptitude for burrowing; you can't help yourselves. You must sniff after reasons,
just as that dog must after moles. He knows perfectly well he will never catch
it, but he's under the imperative necessity of digging for it.”

“But he might find it.”

“Might!—but he never has and never will. Life is too short to run
after mights; we must have certainties.”

She tucked the box under her arm and was about to walk on, when Gregory Rose,
with
page: 63 shining spurs, an ostrich feather in
his hat, and a silver-headed whip, careered past. He bowed gallantly as he went
by. They waited till the dust of the horse's hoofs had laid itself.

“There,” said Lyndall, “goes a true woman—one born for the sphere that some women
have to fill without being born for it. How happy he would be sewing frills into
his little girl's frocks, and how pretty he would look sitting in a parlour,
with a rough man making love to him! Don't you think so?”

“I shall not stay here when he is master,” Waldo answered, not able to connect
any kind of beauty with Gregory Rose.

“I should imagine not. The rule of a woman is tyranny; but the rule of a
man-woman grinds fine. Where are you going?”

“Anywhere.”

“What to do?”

“See—see everything.”

page: 64

“You will be disappointed.”

“And were you?”

“Yes; and you will be more so. I want some things that men and the world give,
you do not. If you have a few yards of earth to stand on, and a bit of blue over
you, and something that you cannot see to dream about, you have all that you
need, all that you know how to use. But I like to see real men. Let them be as
disagreeable as they please, they are more interesting to me than flowers, or
trees, or stars, or any other thing under the sun. Sometimes,” she added,
walking on, and shaking the dust daintily from her skirts, “when I am not too
busy trying to find a new way of doing my hair that will show my little neck to
better advantage, or over other work of that kind, sometimes it amuses me
intensely to trace out the resemblance between one man and another: to see how
Tant' Sannie and I, you and Bonaparte, St. Simon on his
page: 65 pillow, and the Emperor dining off larks' tongues,
are one and the same compound, merely mixed in different proportions. What is
microscopic in one is largely developed in another; what is a rudimentary fold
in me is a great active organ in you; but all things are in all men, and one
soul is the model of all. We shall find nothing new in human nature after we
have once carefully dissected and analyzed the one being we ever shall truly
know—ourself. The Kaffir girl threw some coffee on my arm in bed this morning; I
felt displeased, but said nothing. Tant' Sannie would have thrown the saucer at
her and sworn for an hour; but the feeling would be the same irritated
displeasure. If a huge animated stomach like Bonaparte were put under a glass by
a skilful mental microscopist, even he would be found to have an embryonic
doubling somewhere indicative of a heart, and rudimentary buddings that might
have become conscience
page: 66 and sincerity:—Let me
take your arm Waldo. How full you are of mealie dust.—No, never mind. It will
brush off.—And sometimes what is more amusing still than tracing the likeness
between man and man, is to trace the analogy there always is between the
progress and development of one individual and of a whole nation; or, again,
between a single nation and the entire human race. It is pleasant when it dawns
on you that the one is just the other written out in large letters; and very odd
to find all the little follies and virtues, and developments and retrogressions,
written out in the big world's book that you find in your little internal self.
It is the most amusing thing I know of; but of course, being a woman, I have not
often time for such amusements. Professional duties always first, you know. It
takes a great deal of time and thought always to look perfectly exquisite even
for a pretty
page: 67 woman. Is the old buggy still in
existence, Waldo?”

“Yes; but the harness is broken.”

“Well, I wish you would mend it. You must teach me to drive. I must learn
something while I am here. I got the Hottentot girl to show me how to make
‘sar-sar-ties’ this morning; and Tant' Sannie is going to teach me to make
‘kapjes.’ I will come and sit with you this afternoon while you mend the
harness.”

“Thank you.”

“No, don't thank me; I come for my own pleasure. I never find any one I can talk
to. Women bore me, and men, I talk so to—‘Going to the ball this evening? Nice
little dog that of yours. Pretty little ears. So fond of pointer pups!’ And they
think me fascinating, charming! Men are like the earth, and we are the moon; we
turn always one side to them, and
page: 68 they think
there is no other, because they don't see it—but there is.”

They had reached the house now.

“Tell me when you set to work,” she said, and walked toward the door.

Waldo stood to look after her, and Doss stood at his side, a look of painful
uncertainty depicted on his small countenance, and one little foot poised in the
air. Should he stay with his master or go? He looked at the figure with the wide
straw hat moving toward the house, and he looked up at his master; then he put
down the little paw and went. Waldo watched them both in at the door and then
walked away alone. He was satisfied that at least his dog was with her.